Carousel

HD video with sound, 04:47

Carousel reflects on the problematics of perception by taking the viewer on a road trip through the high desert, where the seen eventually breaks apart and the limits between agreed-upon physical reality, head trips and disassociation become blurred. Footage scanning through Joshua Tree is seen through disused military optics or prisms, responding to an ancient theory claiming that we see the world as a result of minuscule crystals within our eyes. As military optics frame perspectives towards specific ends, so too might the eye and its crystalline components.

The uncanny landscape, which on its own says so much about the falseness of what we think to be true - after all, Joshua Trees are yucca bushes, posing as trees - is deconstructed into what composes its visuals: the color spectrum. In this way, the aesthetics of the work also double back on a resurgence in desire for higher vision, by mimicking motifs from psychedelia. This is furthered by a sound track composed via the artist’s performance with crystal singing bowls.

Carousel offers an affective vision through which we might collectively reconsider how we make sense of the “natural” world and of each other.

:: Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council and the AC Institute, New York City.

Meridiano Cristalino

The space between me and you is both endless and imaginary. Vision becomes the ruler by which we measure color, distance, difference. What might happen in the distance between me and you, then, becomes infinite.

Meridiano Cristalino or Cristalline Meridian was produced on the Costa de la Luz or Coast of Light in Spain, where vantage points onto Africa are multiple. Here, skimming the ocean, light is both arriving and departing. The curious hundred or so watchtowers standing firm across the Spanish coast each contain their own unique perspective. What knowledge of the self and the other is received and transmitted at every moment? How has this exchange shaped history, waging wars, and our understanding of the world today?

This work was created as a 3-monitor video installation confronting a metaphorical watcher to the other and to itself while disassembling their representational likeness through telescope lenses. A dialogue. A single moving image projection has then been created, distilling the conversation into the fabric of the visible between one watcher (or coast) and the other.

Meridiano Cristalino - excerpt - moving image installation

Excerpt of the moving image from the installation

Landscape, Cutout

HD moving image loop. Image en mouvement HD bouclée. 2015

Landscape, Cutout emphasizes the constructedness of reality or the world surrounding us, and vision’s sometimes problematic role within this construction. In this particular work, a still image is crudely cut up to form arbitrary divisions in our view of the landscape. Using the screen’s light to brighten individual cutouts at varying intervals, the landscape can be seen to subtly change in perspective. As the moving image transforms slowly over time, only memory can reveal its lack of fixity and ever going shift.

- Excerpt from essay on Annie Briard's landscape work by curator and writer Derrick Chang:In another perspectival moving image experiment, Landscape, Cutout (2015) uses multiple digitally cutout still frames to construct the image of a canyon and ravine. Staggering them at varying intervals the vignette manipulates both depth and perspective. In the image, rather than creating arbitrary divisions in the photograph, Briard shines light through the cutouts creating subtle, almost imperceptible changes in the landscape. As a moving image Landscape, Cutout shows the transformations produced by the artificial mimicking of direct sunlight and the diffused light produced by cloudy conditions. The fixity of the still landscape creates a moving image not by turning a photograph into a time lapse video but by changing the conditions of its lighting. The simplicity of the transformation are illustrated through quiet, slow changes in lighting that reveal minute details of the photograph giving it a more dimensional and textured quality.

Landscape, Cutout 1

View of 3 stills from the moving image

Apertures series

Apertures consist of short looped moving images inserted into the wall on small LCD screens, behind metal peepholes.

“My face pressed against a wall-mounted peephole in a back corner of the gallery, I struggle to make out the image on a recessed LCD screen. Focusing eventually on a sun-dappled forest, it takes another second to notice the man standing off to the right, just within my peripheral vision. It takes another second to notice his head is twice the size it should be, a buzzy, pixelated blur that might or might not be mouthing words.

One of three such Apertures, the forest vignette recalls the "flashed face distortion effect," or "ugly face illusion," discovered by accident some years ago. The setup is simple: viewers stare at a fixed point while rapid-fire streams of faces (one version uses photos of Hollywood actors) flash by to either side. Unable to focus, the eye and brain do their best, inadvertently transforming half-seen faces in to grotesque caricatures, all teeth and eyes and monstrous jawlines. The effect is both alarming and instructive.”

Presence

Composed of photographs morphed together, a still portrait becomes an uncanny being.

“The work Presence is composed of a series of still portrait photographs shot at different depths of field. I remember being very young and realizing how faces changed drastically depending on their proximity to me. The closer they were, the rounder they appeared, and this changed the way I interpreted the person who they belonged to. Years later, I met a vision scientist who discovered, while trying to determine the best lenses for 3D filmmaking, that people reacted in similarly emotionally charged ways to a neutral face depending on the lens it was shot with. In Presence, the static face seems to become alien, breathing and pulsating with life in a way that becomes uncanny and asks us to ponder the ways in which vision affects how we interpret one another.” – excerpted from an interview with Articulaction magazine

Presence - excerpt

L'assaut du néant

The relationship between what we perceive and our internal world of emotion, memory, and ideologies, is a tangled one. Beyond our individual bodies mediating what we see in diverse ways, so too does our unconscious affect our systems of seeing, further removing us from each other’s experience of our surroundings. Identifying these differences in perception can open the door to all experiences being understood as valid; where what we designate as reality can only be a fluid sum of all our views.

L’assaut du néant explores this terrain by using captured footage of the surrounding environment from high up above - as ‘’Archimedean’’ a view as perhaps ever possible - and manipulating it though optical effects and disassembling. Aesthetically borrowing from psychological vision testing tropes of inkblots and light flicker, the moving image calls upon the viewer to question the processes of the unconscious that flavour their phenomenological experience. Here, the world scrolls by for each of us in a deeply personal way.

The series Perceptual Moments explores and complicates perception, its associated mental phenomena, and seeks to uncover how vision relates to the construct of the world around us.

The works are displayed both as a series in individually framed monitors or independently on monitors or projections.

L'assaut du néant (excerpt)

Created through deconstructed footage of the arctic and mirroring effects, this looping work reproduces the theories behind the Rorschach tests but with an ever-transforming “inkblot”. The work taps into the unconscious and produces imagery from the symbolic to the grotesque through the viewer’s own process of pattern-seeking and thought association. How do we consider landscape, when its imagery seems to stem from within?

Being Crystal

HD moving image loop2013

"Being Crystal" is a meditative response to the tenuous notion of self and personal identity at a time in which the physical and virtual converge, while also fragmenting and simulating various personas for the individual.The video was shot of the artist in a meditative trance following a visit to a salt cave with purported healing and cleansing properties. By removing most of their facial features and individualistic traces, the figure physically loses a sense of self in an attempt to instigate or mirror a sought-after dissipation of selfhood in an age of anxiety.This video was created as part of the Lucida Lab collaborative.